Moving the Enterprise Backup to the Cloud - A Step-By-Step Guide

Making sure everything in the data center is properly protected is a common struggle that all data centers face. The cloud, cloud backup, seems like an answer to all those struggles. But, how exactly does IT make the conversion from on-premises backup to cloud backup? Join experts from Storage Switzerland, Veeam and KeepItSafe and learn; a method to determine if cloud backup is right for your organization and if it is, how to create a plan to begin the transfer to cloud based data protection operations.

Most storage consolidation strategies fail because they attempt to consolidate to a single piece of storage hardware. To successfully consolidate storage, IT professionals need to look at consolidation strategies that worked. Server consolidation was VMware’s first use case. It was successful because instead of consolidating hardware, VMware consolidated the environment under a single hypervisor (ESXi) and console (vCenter) but still provided organizations with hardware flexibility. A successful storage consolidation strategy needs to follow a similar formula by providing a single software solution that controls a variety of storage hardware, but that software also has to extract maximum performance and value from each hardware platform on which it sits.

Join Storage Switzerland and StorOne in which we discuss how to design a storage consolidation strategy for today, the future and the cloud.

In this webinar learn:

- The problems with a fragmented approach to storage
- Why storage fragmentation promises to get worse because of AI, ML, and the Cloud
- Why consolidating to a single storage system won’t work
- Why hyperconverged architectures fall short
- Why Software Defined Storage falls short
- Why the organization needs a Storage Hypervisor

Organizations are moving to the cloud but according to a recent Osterman Research study, only 14% of companies have completed that transformation. The study clearly identifies data storage as an area where IT can easily accelerate their cloud transformation journey. Potentially more so than any other component, intelligently moving data to the cloud has the opportunity to significantly lower on-premises storage costs without the threat of impacting day to day operations.

Join Storage Switzerland, HubStor and Osterman Research for our live webinar where we’ll discuss the results of the Osterman Research study, what it means for IT, and how IT can take advantage of that research to leverage the cloud to alleviate data management and data protection concerns.

All pre-registrants will receive our exclusive eBook, “Understanding the Difference Between Data Protection and Data Management.” Sign up now and get your copy today.

The cloud seems like a logical destination for backup data. It is by definition off-site, and the organization no longer needs to worry about allocating valuable floor space to secondary data storage. The problem is that most cloud backup solutions fall short of delivering enterprise class data protection.

Most cloud backup solutions are too complicated to set up and upgrade, don't provide complete platform support, don't provide flexible recovery options, can't meet the enterprises RTO/RPO requirements and don't provide a class of support that enables organizations to lower their operational expense.

In this live webinar Storage Switzerland and Carbonite discuss the five critical capabilities that enterprises, looking to move to cloud backup, need to make sure their solution has.

Join us for this live event to learn:

1. Why switch to the cloud for enterprise backup?
2. The five critical capabilities enterprises MUST have in cloud backup solutions. What they are and why enterprises need them.
3. Why and where most solutions miss the mark
4. How Carbonite Server delivers the five critical capabilities

Designing architectures to backup primary storage as well as provide rapid recoveries is a challenging task that most IT professionals need to face. It is even more challenging in the face of a rapidly growing data set, increasing demand for shorter recovery times and new threats like ransomware. The cost for IT to design, implement, maintain and upgrade these infrastructures can consume a big part of the IT budget. Additionally, the time required for each of these steps is something that most IT teams simply don’t have.

As a result, many organizations are looking for ways to move to an infrastructure-less architecture where most of the physical hardware is in the cloud as well as the software intelligence. The goal is to move data protection from a very unpredictable CAPEX cost to a normalized OPEX cost. There are an increasing number of cloud solutions that claim an infrastructure-less solution but many of these solutions force the organization to give up many of the capabilities they’ve come to count on or force them into long-term cloud relationships.

Attendees to the webinar will learn the challenges of maintaining an on-premises infrastructure, why current cloud solutions fall short and what IT really needs from an infrastructure-less solution.

Backup software is continuously improving. Solutions like Veeam Backup and Replication deliver instant recoveries, enabling virtual machine volumes to instantiate directly on the backup device, without having to wait for data to transfer back to primary storage. These solutions can also move older backups to higher capacity, lower cost object storage or cloud storage systems. To deliver meaningful performance during instant recovery without exceeding the backup storage budget requires IT to re-think its backup storage architecture.

Modern backup processes need high performance, low capacity systems to deliver high-performance instant recovery, as well as high-capacity, modest performance systems to store backup data long term and software to manage data placement for the most appropriate recovery performance while not breaking the budget.

Edge Computing, often referred to as Distributed Cloud, is becoming a requirement for a set of new application use cases revolving around IoT, AI/ML and other new technologies requiring ultra low latency, data thinning to reduce bandwidth costs, autonomy, and privacy. These drivers mean that data center operators need to rethink their networking infrastructure as they plan for and deploy edge compute which will result in an explosion of mini- and micro-data centers. New approaches leveraging open networking, next generation SDN fabrics and network automation are required to simplify, manage and troubleshoot their increasingly distributed network infrastructures.

Reducing or a least slowing the growth of storage costs is a top priority facing IT organizations in 2019. In this live webinar with Storage Switzerland and SolarWinds, you will learn the three steps IT professionals can take to lower storage costs WITHOUT buying more storage (the typical vendor answer). The biggest challenges are that IT professionals don't arm themselves with the tools they need to be successful, take the next step in their career path and of course, save their company money.

Join us for our live interactive webinar and learn:

1. How to Eliminate/Resolve Storage Problems - Not Throw Hardware at the Problem
2. Plan and be prepared for capacity growth and performance demands
3. How to manage multiple vendor's storage systems without replacing them

Most organizations use Network Attached Storage (NAS) to store data, but the modern workforce and organization expect more capabilities than what the typical NAS can provide. Also, as organizations themselves become more distributed, the idea of a single centralized file server with users tunneling through virtual private networks won’t scale. The common alternative, putting a NAS in each remote office offers problems of its own when IT tries to make sure the data is protected and made available to the right users at the right time.

NVMe storage systems and NVMe networks promise to reduce latency further and increase performance beyond what SAS based flash systems and current networking technology can deliver. To take advantage of that performance gain however, the data center must have workloads that can take advantage of all the latency reduction and performance improvements that NVMe offers. Vendors emphatically state that NVMe is the next must-have technology, yet many still continue to provide SAS based arrays using traditional networks.

How do IT planners know then, that investing in NVMe will truly provide their organizations the benefits of NVMe for their demanding applications and see a measurable return on investment? Just creating a test environment to perform an NVMe evaluation can break the IT budget!

Register now to join Storage Switzerland, Virtual Instruments, and SANBlaze as we look at the state of the data center and provide IT planners with the information they need to decide if NVMe is an investment they should make now or if they should wait a year or more. The key is determining which applications can benefit from NVMe-based approaches.

In this live event, IT professionals will learn
- About NVMe, NVMe Storage Systems and NVMe over Fabric Networking
- The Performance Potential of NVMe Storage and Networks
- What attributes are needed for a workload to take advantage of NVMe
- Why NVMe creates problems for current IT testing strategies
- Why a Workload Simulation approach is the only practical way to test NVMe
- How to build a storage performance validation practice

If you think the cloud provides enough protection for your critical data, you’re putting that data at risk. You can’t assume data is protected because it’s “in the cloud” -- you need to ensure all of the data in your critical applications, including Office 365 and Salesforce.com, get the protection they deserve.

Join George Crump, Founder, and Lead Analyst at Storage Switzerland, and W. Curtis Preston (a.k.a. Mr. Backup), Chief Technologist at Druva, where they will discuss:

- What level of protection do cloud services provide?
- Is the provided level of protection enough for the enterprise?
- What does the enterprise need to add to achieve complete protection?

Register Now and get Storage Switzerland’s latest eBook “Protecting the Organization From Its Endpoints.”

Most data centers still use a legacy DR strategy of replicating or even physically transporting backups to a dedicated disaster recovery (DR) site, or a secondary site owned by the organization. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) delivers a compelling alternative to traditional DR, return on investment (ROI). It eliminates the costs associated with a dedicated disaster recovery site like paying for and equipping the site. Organizations though are hesitant to transition to DRaaS following the “if it ain’t broke, don't fix it” philosophy.

In this live 15 minute webinar join Storage Switzerland, Veeam and KeepItSafe to learn how to transition from a legacy DR strategy to DRaaS without risking data protection downtime.

Managing and protecting critical data across servers and applications in multiple locations around the globe is challenging. And the more decentralized and complex your infrastructure, the more difficult it is to manage your data. The potential bad news? Data loss, site outages, revenue loss, and potential non-compliance with regulations.

But here’s the good news: centralizing data protection in the cloud can make all the difference. That’s why you should join our webinar and hear from storage expert, George Crump, from Storage Switzerland and Druva’s W. Curtis Preston, Chief Technologist, as they discuss:

• Why protecting a distributed data center is challenging with traditional methods
• How a cloud-centralized backup strategy can be a game changer for your organization
• How Druva can help you drastically improve data protection quality, reduce costs, and simplify global management and configuration?

Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) leverage intelligent software to manage commodity hardware to create a flexible data center that meets performance and capacity requirements while simplifying operations and reducing overall data center costs. While the vision of SDDC sounds ideal for organizations, its execution is less than ideal. Storage remains a significant roadblock for organizations looking for a software-defined future.

Join Storage Switzerland and Datera for another episode in our 15-minute webinar series, “Will the Software Defined Data Center Ever Happen,” to learn the concept behind SDDC, why it has stumbled out of the gate and what IT Professionals should be demanding from SDDC vendors to deliver the SDDC promise.

NVMe enables storage system vendors to once again raise expectations on the performance capabilities of all-flash arrays. NVMe provides a higher command count, greater queue depth and leverages the PCIe interface to deliver a significant increase in IOPS potential with a corresponding reduction in latency. NVMe though, brings with it some confusion about who can best benefit from the technology and what are the right steps to implementing it.

Watch the webinar and get answers to these questions:
- Can “regular” data centers benefit from NVMe or just companies specializing in AI?
- Does NVMe have to be end-to-end for data centers to benefit?
- Do features such as deduplication and compression impact performance?
- Does NVMe Flash mean that SAS Flash is no longer relevant?

Most organization’s use of public cloud storage resources is the hybrid use case. A hybrid cloud strategy enables organizations to leverage the location and resources that make the most sense for the given workload. A hybrid cloud strategy though requires a free-flow of information between on-premises and cloud storage. The problem is that most of the information exchange is metadata, not actual data and most cloud solutions don’t specifically address metadata acceleration.

When most vendors talk about solving an organization’s storage problems, they typically are talking about solving their challenges in one of three categories: the data center, the edge or the cloud. The reality is that even within these three categories, most vendors only solve one of several problems: primary storage, secondary storage, archive storage or backup storage. IT needs a solution that can address not only all the categories of storage but also the types of storage within them.

Join Storage Switzerland and ClearSky to learn:

- The storage and data protection demand on the data center, the edge, and the cloud
- Why traditional data center, edge and cloud storage and data protection solutions fall short
- How to design an architecture that integrates data center, edge and cloud storage architectures and solves the storage and data protection problem

Hyperconverged Infrastructure is supposed to simplify the data center by creating an environment that automatically scales as new applications and workloads are added to it. The problem is that the current generation of HCI solutions can only address specific use cases like virtual desktops or tier 2 applications. First generation HCI solutions don’t have the per node power to accommodate enterprise workloads and tier 1 applications. The organization needs a next generation HCI solution, HCI 2.0, that can address HCI 1.0 shortcomings and fulfill the original promises of HCI; Lower costs, faster innovation, simpler scale, single vendor and unified management. The combination enables HCI 2.0 to handle a variety of storage intensive workloads.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is potentially one of the best use cases for cloud resources. DR sites owned by the organization are expensive to set up and maintain as well as challenging to get to when a disaster strikes. DRaaS resolves these issues by creating an on-demand DR site where the cloud delivers IT resources as they are needed. IT planners though, may overlook some aspects of DRaaS solutions, especially when using the large public cloud providers.

In this webinar join Storage Switzerland, Veeam and KeepItSafe where we leverage a panel of backup and recovery veterans to identify common oversights seen in organizations’ DRaaS strategies and how to address them.

Join Storage Switzerland and Igneous for another Fifteen Minute Friday: Storage Tips for the Weekend. Most organizations are not satisfied with their ability to backup, recovery and correctly retain unstructured data. The combination of unprecedented growth and increased scrutiny caused by regulations like GDPR and CCPA is pushing organizations to the brink. It's time to stop the madness!

Consumption based IT is a curated set of IT solutions that focus on business outcomes. As the name implies it is purchased on a pay-as-you-go model. The goal of consumption based IT is to simplify establishing IT infrastructure that incorporates both the on-premises data center and the cloud to support a wide variety of workloads including traditional transactional databases, big data analytics, containers and many others.

A key aspect of consumption based IT is how the data created by these workloads will be protected. In fact, the right consumption based IT solution should curate end-to-end backup directly into the solution.

In our live webinar join Storage Switzerland, Veeam, and HPE to learn about consumption based IT, what to look for in a consumption based solution, how data protection can protect the solution and how data protection can be offered as a consumption based solution protecting both legacy and new architectures.

Tune into Storage Switzerland's channel to learn from this analyst firm focused on storage, virtualization and the cloud. Storage Switzerland’s goal is to provide unbiased evaluations and interview content on sponsoring and non-sponsoring companies through articles, public events and product reviews.